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The Age of the Essay
September 2004
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic
sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs,
conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick
was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story:
what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least,
how I write one.
Mods
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things
one has to write in school is that real essays are not
exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should
teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical
accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together
with the study of literature. And so all over the country
students are writing not about how a baseball team with a
small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of
color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but
about symbolism in Dickens.
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and
pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens
himself would be more interested in an essay about color or
baseball.
How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back
almost a thousand years. Around 1100, Europe at last began to
catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had
the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call "the
classics." The effect was rather as if we were visited by
beings from another solar system. These earlier civilizations
were so much more sophisticated that for the next several
centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every
field, was to assimilate what they knew.
During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great
prestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. As
European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less
important; by 1350 someone who wanted to learn about science
could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1]
But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th
century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of
the curriculum.
The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of
ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern
texts? The answer, of course, is that the original raison
d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual
archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of
contemporary authors. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to
give that answer. The archaeological work being mostly done,
it implied that those studying the classics were, if not
wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor
importance.
And so began the study of modern literature. There was a good
deal of resistance at first. The first courses in English
literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges,
particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the University of
Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught
English literature in the 1820s. But Harvard didn't have a
professor of English literature until 1876, and Oxford not
till 1885. (Oxford had a chair of Chinese before it had one of
English.) [2]
What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been
the idea that professors should do research as well as teach.
This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the
whole concept of the modern university) was imported from
Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins
in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.
Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught
English composition. But how do you do research on
composition? The professors who taught math could be required
to do original math, the professors who taught history could
be required to write scholarly articles about history, but
what about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition?
What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to
be English literature. [3]
And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was
inherited by English professors. This had two drawbacks: (a)
an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any
more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b)
the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since
that's what the professor is interested in.
High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable
high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National
Education Association "formally recommended that literature
and composition be unified in the high school course." [4] The
'riting component of the 3 Rs then morphed into English, with
the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to
write about English literature-- to write, without even
realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had
been publishing in their journals a few decades before.
It's no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless
exercise, because we're now three steps removed from real
work: the students are imitating English professors, who are
imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of
a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago,
fascinating and urgently needed work.
No Defense
The other big difference between a real essay and the things
they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't
take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the
idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out
to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.
It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were
mostly seminaries. In fact they were more law schools. And at
least in our tradition lawyers are advocates, trained to take
either side of an argument and make as good a case for it as
they can. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early
universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing
persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5]
And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was
the disputation. This is at least nominally preserved in our
present-day thesis defense: most people treat the words thesis
and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least,
a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the
argument by which one defended it.
Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal
dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I
think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that
you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you
can't change the question.
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the
things they teach you to write in high school. The topic
sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting
paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the
conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure
about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just
supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but
in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother?
But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay,"
you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the
concluding remarks to the jury.
Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be
convincing because you got the right answers, not because you
did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to
friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore
them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually
be fixed by cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing
bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.
At the very least I must have explained something badly. In
that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to
come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just
incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have to change
what I was saying as well. But the aim is never to be
convincing per se. As the reader gets smarter, convincing and
true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I
must be near the truth.
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid
(or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically
inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.
Trying
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into
history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de
Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called
"essais." He was doing something quite different from what
lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name.
Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an
attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure
something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin
with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have
one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a
question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and
defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and
walk in to see what's inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to
write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well,
there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing
ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a
word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when
I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely
explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're
writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to
clean up your apartment, writing something that other people
will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have
an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no
good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I
find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off
to get a cup of tea.
Many published essays peter out in the same way. Particularly
the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines.
Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the
defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a
rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers
feel obliged to write something "balanced." Since they're
writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most
radioactively controversial questions, from which-- because
they're writing for a popular magazine-- they then proceed to
recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says
one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the
question is a complex one. (But don't get mad at us. We didn't
draw any conclusions.)
The River
Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers.
They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a
promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't
publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive
results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader
something he didn't already know.
But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's
interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. In
defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you're
not concerned with truth. You already know where you're going,
and you want to go straight there, blustering through
obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But
that's not what you're trying to do in an essay. An essay is
supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if
it didn't meander.
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might
expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this
out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most
economical route to the sea. [6]
The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For
the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the
places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have
quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally
what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I
want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas
take their course.
This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up
against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does:
backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after
following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go
back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a
cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up
conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of
false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut
and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator
inking over a pencil drawing. But don't change so much that
you lose the spontaneity of the original.
Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference
work. It's not something you read looking for a specific
answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. I'd much rather
read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting
direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed
course.
Surprise
So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise.
Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the
principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it
will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up.
Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum
surprise.
I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel
vicariously. When friends came back from faraway places, it
wasn't just out of politeness that I asked what they saw. I
really wanted to know. And I found the best way to get
information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How
was the place different from what they expected? This is an
extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most
unobservant people, and it will extract information they
didn't even know they were recording.
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that
contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the
most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food
that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy
effects of things you've already eaten.
How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of
essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.)
The trick is to use yourself as a proxy for the reader. You
should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And
anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought
about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you
can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no
one knows who the best programmers are overall. I didn't
realize this when I began that essay, and even now I find it
kind of weird. That's what you're looking for.
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a
few topics you've thought about a lot, and some ability to
ferret out the unexpected.
What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn't
matter-- that anything can be interesting if you get deeply
enough into it. One possible exception might be things that
have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them,
like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything
interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins? Well, it was
interesting how important color was to the customers. Kids a
certain age would point into the case and say that they wanted
yellow. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon? They would just
look at you blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was
the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream
was so appealing. (I think now it was the salt.) And the
difference in the way fathers and mothers bought ice cream for
their kids: the fathers like benevolent kings bestowing
largesse, the mothers harried, giving in to pressure. So, yes,
there does seem to be some material even in fast food.
I didn't notice those things at the time, though. At sixteen I
was about as observant as a lump of rock. I can see more now
in the fragments of memory I preserve of that age than I could
see at the time from having it all happening live, right in
front of me.
Observation
So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be
an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you
learn it?
To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read
history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems
to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for
new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge
at an exponential rate. Once you remember that Normans
conquered England in 1066, it will catch your attention when
you hear that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about
the same time. Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and
take note when a third book mentions that Normans were not,
like most of what is now called France, tribes that flowed in
as the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings (norman = north
man) who arrived four centuries later in 911. Which makes it
easier to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings
in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.
Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies
you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which
means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should
become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to
think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids
are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just
mistaken.
When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer. But (as with
wealth) there may be habits of mind that will help the process
along. It's good to have a habit of asking questions,
especially questions beginning with Why. But not in the random
way that three year olds ask why. There are an infinite number
of questions. How do you find the fruitful ones?
I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem
wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between
humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a
character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? There's a
whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure.
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a
degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're
only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the
rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things
are the way they are because that is how things have to be.
For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay
felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process
seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to
hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all
thought there was just something we weren't getting.
I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things
that seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way.
I'm always pleased when I see someone laugh as they read a
draft of an essay. But why should I be? I'm aiming for good
ideas. Why should good ideas be funny? The connection may be
surprise. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one
wants to deliver.
I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never
actually get around to reading them and using what I've
written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later.
So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down
leaves in your head.
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a
disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to
be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old
could tell you, is nil admirari. When you're mistaken, don't
dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one
will notice.
One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where
inexperience may make you look foolish. If you want to find
surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different
things, because some of the most interesting surprises are
unexpected connections between different fields. For example,
jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most
pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of
preservation. And so were books and paintings.
Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic
history, not political history. History seems to me so
important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of
study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so
far.
Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that
there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our
noses. Swords evolved during the Bronze Age out of daggers,
which (like their flint predecessors) had a hilt separate from
the blade. Because swords are longer the hilts kept breaking
off. But it took five hundred years before someone thought of
casting hilt and blade as one piece.
Disobedience
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're
not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or
not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on.
If you're curious about something, trust your instincts.
Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's
something you're really interested in, you'll find they have
an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the
conversation of people who are especially proud of something
always tends to lead back to it.
For example, I've always been fascinated by comb-overs,
especially the extreme sort that make a man look as if he's
wearing a beret made of his own hair. Surely this is a lowly
sort of thing to be interested in-- the sort of superficial
quizzing best left to teenage girls. And yet there is
something underneath. The key question, I realized, is how
does the comber-over not see how odd he looks? And the answer
is that he got to look that way incrementally. What began as
combing his hair a little carefully over a thin patch has
gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity.
Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for
constructive purposes too: just as you can trick yourself into
looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating
something so grand that you would never have dared to plan
such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets
created. You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard
can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating
system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in
painting, or in a novel?
See what you can extract from a frivolous question? If there's
one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it
would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're
supposed to. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns
nothing from what one expects. And don't write the way they
taught you to in school.
The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at
all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of
becoming rampant. It used to be that only a tiny number of
officially approved writers were allowed to write essays.
Magazines published few of them, and judged them less by what
they said than who wrote them; a magazine might publish a
story by an unknown writer if it was good enough, but if they
published an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at
least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a
problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can't say
precisely because they're insiders.
The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on
the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it
says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are
whatever you wrote.
Popular magazines made the period between the spread of
literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short
story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.
And that's certainly not something I realized when I started
writing this.
Notes
[1] I'm thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it's hard to pick
a date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarship
just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The
cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend in
scientific progress matches the population curve.
[2] Parker, William R. "Where Do College English Departments
Come From?" College English 28 (1966-67), pp. 339-351.
Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. (ed). The Department of English
at Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970. Indiana
University Publications.
Daniels, Robert V. The University of Vermont: The First Two
Hundred Years. University of Vermont, 1991.
Mueller, Friedrich M. Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette. 1886/
87. Reprinted in Bacon, Alan (ed). The Nineteenth-Century
History of English Studies. Ashgate, 1998.
[3] I'm compressing the story a bit. At first literature took
a back seat to philology, which (a) seemed more serious and
(b) was popular in Germany, where many of the leading scholars
of that generation had been trained.
In some cases the writing teachers were transformed in situ
into English professors. Francis James Child, who had been
Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851, became
in 1876 the university's first professor of English.
[4] Parker, op. cit., p. 25.
[5] The undergraduate curriculum or trivium (whence "trivial")
consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Candidates
for masters' degrees went on to study the quadrivium of
arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Together these
were the seven liberal arts.
The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where
it was considered the most important subject. It would not be
far from the truth to say that education in the classical
world meant training landowners' sons to speak well enough to
defend their interests in political and legal disputes.
[6] Trevor Blackwell points out that this isn't strictly true,
because the outside edges of curves erode faster.
Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin,
Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, and Robert Morris for
reading drafts of this.
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